Federal agents in San Diego have arrested the attorney general for the Mexican state of Nayarit on charges that he conspired to smuggle heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine into the U.S.

Edgar Veytia, 46, was detained Monday at the U.S. border in San Diego on an indictment handed down by a grand jury in New York, Ralph DeSio, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said Wednesday.

The indictment was filed March 2 in the Eastern District of New York — the same jurisdiction where federal prosecutors have charged Sinaloa cartel commander Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — and a U.S. magistrate judge in Brooklyn unsealed the charging papers on Tuesday.

Veytia allegedly was affiliated with the Sinaloa Cartel, and went by several aliases, including Diablo (Devil).

The Supreme Court, which is packed with allies of President Nicolás Maduro, ruled late Wednesday that the congress was in contempt of court for having sworn in three lawmakers from the remote Amazonas state whom the ruling party had accused of electoral fraud. The court said it takes over all “parliamentary capacities” until the conflict is resolved.

“Maduro now has all powers in his hands, without any checks and balances,” Mr. [Assembly President Julio] Borges said. “This is the action of a desperate man who knows the whole world is turning against him.”

Maduro and his regime have been doing this for a while; this move only makes it official. As John Sexton points out,

As the country’s financial situation continued to deteriorate, the opposition party won 112 of 167 seats in the National Assembly in elections held in December 2015. However, before the outgoing socialists left office they helped stack the country’s Supreme Court with judges loyal to the socialists. The result was that even once the opposition took power in January 2016, nearly every effort they made to change the direction of the country has been overruled by the court.

A more fruitful step for the international community would be to find ways to help alleviate Venezuela’s immediate problems. The most urgent issue is persuading the government to accept humanitarian aid by putting forward detailed offers of needed food and medicine. A growing number of Venezuelans are going hungry in a food shortage, and dying from treatable ailments in squalid, ill-equipped hospitals.

A Mexican journalist was shot and injured early on Wednesday in the eastern state of Veracruz, the state attorney general’s office said, the latest in a spate of attacks against reporters in Mexico.

The 51-year-old news editor at La Opinion de Poza Rica, a newspaper in the violent oil-drilling city of Poza Rica in the drug-ravaged state, was shot outside his home early on Wednesday morning. The attorney general’s office in a statement identified him only as ‘A.A.G.’ but the State Commission for the Protection of Journalists named him as Armando Arrieta Granados.

A leftist mob, some have identified as paid agitators, violently attacked Ecuador’s center-right presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso and his family Tuesday night as they attempted to leave a soccer match in the nation’s capital, Quito.

The mob – reportedly armed with bottles, sticks, stones, and knives – jeered the presidential candidate and his family and injured police detail assigned to escort the family out of Quito’s Atahualpa Olympic Stadium where Ecuador’s national soccer team was facing Colombia’s for a spot in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The crowd shouted, “out, banker!” at Lasso – whose pre-politics career was in finance – while making noise with vuvuzelas and hurling projectiles at the family.
. . .

“When we left the stadium, Alianza Paz [leftist party] militants began throwing bottles, sticks, and threatened us with knives,” Lasso said in a statement to the press. “All I could do was protect my wife with my body and receive the blows from the objects on my head.”

Lasso tweeted video of the incident,

The video clearly shows violent crowds pelting police officers and the Lasso family while hurling epithets at them. The younger Lasso accuses the government of socialist president Rafael Correa of hiring paid agitators to attack the family.

“My son Santiago narrates what we went through yesterday. The images speak for themselves. We don’t want this Ecuador for our children”

While the official surveys show Moreno ahead by five percentage points, 16 percent of their respondents said they were undecided.

Correa’s party has a lot riding on this election, as Mary O’Grady noted,

Mr. Moreno is Mr. Correa’s proxy in this election. A Moreno triumph is important if Mr. Correa is to be protected from the wide array of corruption investigations that his opponents are demanding.

Mr. Moreno would also act as a placeholder for Mr. Correa until the 2021 election, as Dmitry Medvedev was for Vladimir Putin from 2008-12. Legalized indefinite re-election would take care of the rest.

Correa vowed to annul the election results if Moreno doesn’t win next Sunday, through a maneuver by which the Ecuadorian Constitution allows him to dissolve the Executive and Judiciary branches and call for new elections.

In-country sources confirmed that OAS election monitors will not be allowed to be present at the electoral board headquarters.

With the application of this ruling, the Supreme Court may annul any action of the National Assembly that violates Article 200 of the Constitution, which indicates that the deputies of the National Parliament “shall enjoy immunity in the exercise of their functions.”

Also, the ruling in question could lead to the prosecution of deputies for “treason to the mother country” in military courts, analysts report.

The self-styled revolutionary, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez and is now 67, was convicted of a 1974 grenade attack on a Paris shop.

Ramirez threw a grenade into the shopping area, killing two and injuring 34 others, the court found.

He denied the charges and called the trial, 43 years later, “absurd”.
Born into a wealthy Venezuelan family, Ramirez studied in Moscow before joining a militant group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He converted to Islam in 1975.
. . .

The self-professed “professional revolutionary” has been found guilty of four bomb attacks:

In March 1982, a bomb exploded on a train between Paris and Toulouse, killing five people and wounding 28

A month later a car bomb attack was mounted on an anti-Syrian newspaper in Paris, with one passer-by killed and 60 injured

On New Year’s Eve 1983, a bomb on a TGV fast train between Marseille and Paris killed three people and wounded 13